


Never Letting Go

by Gadhar



Category: The Expendables (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-04
Updated: 2015-09-04
Packaged: 2018-04-19 00:09:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4725413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gadhar/pseuds/Gadhar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>D: I own nothing.</p><p>That moment you're writing a fic and then another idea comes out of nowhere and demands to be written all in one go so you're going to bed a 1:30 in the morning even though you gotta get up at 5.</p><p>Anyway, it's not really even proofread. And I have to go back and tag with warnings and all that shit. But, some fic needs to get out there so....</p>
    </blockquote>





	Never Letting Go

**Author's Note:**

> D: I own nothing.
> 
> That moment you're writing a fic and then another idea comes out of nowhere and demands to be written all in one go so you're going to bed a 1:30 in the morning even though you gotta get up at 5.
> 
> Anyway, it's not really even proofread. And I have to go back and tag with warnings and all that shit. But, some fic needs to get out there so....

It all started with Barney’s hand around his when they were in a bar and Lee was ready to put a knife through his own throat. 

To this day he’s not sure if Barney was aware of his real plan, it had been a hostile meeting between them at first. The guys had thought it was just Barney showing up with a job offer and Lee taking it and neither Barney nor Lee had ever said anything to dissuade that belief and they weren't about to start.

It wasn’t what had happened though, not really. 

Lee had gone AWOL. It was right after the Gulf War and he had lost his team and the blame was being pinned on him and it had gotten to the point where he didn’t care anymore. 

Not about the war, not about queen and country, not about the few family members he had left scattered about and certainly not about himself. But everything be damned if he was going to stay and work for the people that betrayed him and abandoned him. 

They left him in a fucking camp for two years and it will forever be the only thing he dreams about at night.

And he had been in that bar, a bar no different than the hundreds of others as he made his way across the UK and then a few months in third world countries until finally he was in the States because it seemed the best place to hide was in plane sight. 

He’d have let them kill him, if they had come after him.

But no, instead they sent a fucking American. Some random bloke out of a different force with no idea what it meant to be a _British soldier_ , no idea what it meant to be _SAS_ , and certainly no idea what it meant to be the reason your whole team was dead and your homeland hated you. Certainly no understanding of the depth of the wound that Lee had suffered: Deep, open and bleeding for years. 

So this American walks into the bar and he’s got a cigar hanging from his lip and a pistol at his back and all Lee can think through the drunken haze is _fuck this shit._

He would’ve let them kill him if it was a countryman. One of his own. Someone who _understood._

Instead he threw the bottle next to him back with the same deadly precision he had used with his knives and it had hit the American in the chest and then they were slipping and sliding through a fight on beer-soaked carpet.

Lee had been thrown into the bar, bouncers closing in and that was when he pulled his knife. The only thing his Da ever gave him and he was going for his own throat. Was intent on just slashing at the skin and letting himself bleed out right there.

But the other guy moved. And the next thing Lee knew the knife was gone and he was curled into a ball sobbing like a sorry ass bloke who’d lost everything. And he had, really. He’d lost it all long ago he just never bothered to grieve. 

Barney had stayed and watched and Lee doesn’t remember anything else about that night except for Barney’s hulking presence; standing over him, the weight of it making Lee’s chest so tight he couldn’t breathe. 

Somehow, they ended up in a truck and from there a hotel or at least what Lee thought was a hotel but it was really Barney’s house but at the time he didn’t care, he just flopped on the bed and passed out and never bothered to think who’s sheets he was staining with blood when he dragged the blade across his wrist later in the night. Never concerned himself with the drops that hit the carpet as Barney had dragged him into the bathroom. 

Lee can remember the towels, black and sopping wet. The blood only seen when Barney left it in the tub in exchange for a new one. Then you saw the puddle of blood bleeding out the cloth and Lee can remember seeing that but not really realizing what it meant or that it was his blood. 

He remembers doing a lot in those first weeks he spent with Barney. How many times he tried, one way or another, to end it. He doesn’t really remember how many towels or sheets or couches he ruined. How many belts Barney threw out because he didn’t want to wear what someone else used as a noose. 

What he does remember, is that Barney never said a word—never cursed under his breath, never said stupid things like how it would all be okay and work out. He never told Lee that trying to kill himself was wrong. Never even held it against Lee that he tried so many times. Or that he even failed so many times. 

And he remembers the look in Barney’s eyes and how different it was from the first look Barney gave him at the bar. Both times it was like looking in a mirror. Except instead of seeing that other half of yourself, Lee just saw an extension. Someone more broken than he was or at the very least, broken for longer. And in the bar it had been a cold dead look and when Barney held him close in the bathroom as he kept Lee’s arm up, twisting the towel tight, it had been a look with a dying light. Like Barney had tried at some emotion and was slowly losing it again. 

And it was that kind of light Lee would keep seeing in Barney’s eyes over the next few years because Barney eventually did offer him a job, some shot at a life or at least a shell of one. It just wasn’t done the way the guys had always thought with one simple bar meet.

It starts again, years later, with Barney’s hand on his again except this time Barney’s hanging out of a chopper and Lee’s screaming at him to not let go, _don’t you fucking dare let go_ and Barney’s looking at him with that damn dying light as his hand slips and Lee can’t keep a hold. It had sort of slowed down, like all those dramatic moments in movies that Lee had thought were complete bullshit because in all his years of combat he’d never experienced the slow mo. 

And it was just as Barney’s fingers were leaving his, the barest tips brushing, that something in him flipped. Something that made him think about all those scars from the past, the ones on his soul, the ones that had been gaping wounds that Barney had sewn up. And he thought about those first months, not the moments where he was bleeding out or asphyxiating, but the ones where Barney would hug him, just to keep him from shaking out of his skin and bouncing off the walls, just to give him an anchor to the here and now; or when he’d sit at Lee’s side to eat instead of across from him because he wanted to be in Lee’s space not just his line of sight; the moments where Barney would sit at one end of the couch, legs stretched out in front of him and Lee sat on the other, knees cuddled to his chest and he would listen and watch as Barney read aloud books that Lee’s family had been too poor to buy. 

He thought of those moments and things just sort of shifted. Now it was his turn. His turn to save Barney, to stitch together gaping wounds and letting Barney fall to his death would be a really bad way to start. So he got what he’d guess would be a second wind, even though, after that mission, it was closer to his fourth or fifth, and he’d lunged out with his other hand, sending himself out the side of the copter and damn glad that one of the guys caught his legs, and he gripped Barney with both hands and never let go.

They started fucking after that. And it was the first time in years that Lee saw a different light in Barney’s eyes. 

He won’t claim it was love because then, it probably wasn’t. It was about relieving stress and blue balls and having someone to drown yourself in so you could forget about the blood and the dead and the demons. And it was sort of like those years in the beginning with Barney so close and in his space, being his anchor. But it was different too. It wasn’t like they were closer but it was a different thread. Barney was stitching up other wounds Lee hadn’t realized he had and they were no more deep than the others, maybe nowhere near so. 

And he found he enjoyed it. Lee would revel in the afterglow sessions with Barney’s arms around him and he would smile when no one was looking at the regular affectionate touches—fist bumps and high fives, shoulder bumps, simple brushing of fingers or holding hands—stupid things that never lasted anything more than a moment. 

The sex was good too. 

So he jumped in with both feet and Barney met him halfway and there were nights they spent blowing each other in the cockpit just to share a cigar and watch the sunrise after. Just to have company. And there were other moments where they just sat together, talking about random shit that neither of them really cared about but it was something to do and Barney always had a hand on his. Every chance he got. 

And sometimes it was a really brutal _fuck me blind_ kind of thing where Barney would have his way with Lee screaming underneath him and they’d be clutching at each other, sweaty and hot and Lee would entangle their fingers and Barney would kiss him stupid.

Somewhere down the line things changed. The team got new members and Barney slashed his own wounds. Wounds so deep Lee thought they’d devour him from the inside. And it sent him stumbling back to where they started, Lee broken and drinking except this time Barney’s hand wasn’t there, no one’s was, so when he went out to that stupid cabin in the woods that Barney made stupid jokes about getting married in, Lee downed the whole bottle of pills with a flask of whiskey and set the thing on fire.

He figured maybe the fire would cauterize the wounds. He’d burn himself black if that’s what it took to seal the wounds this time around. He didn’t have Barney to do it. He didn’t have anyone. 

And he can still smell the smoldering wood sometimes, especially when the shower water hits the burn across his shoulder wrong and he feels that phantom burn again. Suddenly he smells it and he feels the heat and he’ll be sitting in that cabin again, watching it burn as pictures of him and his old squad turned to ash under the flames. 

Barney always has to drag him out of the shower when that happens. And they end up sitting on the bed with Barney wrapped around him and reading as Lee stares at a wall until he can’t see anything anymore. 

Firemen dragged him out the cabin. And they’d only got there in time because some hiker saw Lee setting the blaze and called it in. It wasn’t Barney that had saved him and the wounds were still there but when he woke up it was to Barney’s hand on his, tight and unrelenting, and Barney just looked at him and said “Never again. I will never again let go.”

And he didn’t. He kept Lee close and he kept him whole and he stitched up the wounds again. He spent whole days with Lee, wrapped around him and pushing into him. Breathing him in and tasting him. Whole days that Lee can still feel the touches tingling across his skin. And the whole time Barney was sealing the wounds, Lee was putting Barney back together. Taking away the guilt of Stonebanks, and the guilt in leaving Lee alone. Lee soothed it all and put him back together and they were both like chipped, glass dolls with so many broken pieces but Lee still thought Barney was beautiful. Broken all to hell as they both were. 

They had Tool officiate it. Trench was an option but in the end Lee wanted Tool and Barney more than readily agreed. It was short and to the point and Barney was wearing some obnoxious velvet suit that damn near looked blue in certain lights and Lee kept it simple and traditional with a black suit and blue tie. Barney said those words again and Lee said his own and it was the first time Lee had ever stopped and realized that the shell of a life that Barney offered him in the beginning had long since been a life worth living and even had he died in that cabin, or in Barney’s bathroom all those years ago, that was the way he wanted to go. With Barney. In mind and heart if not in body. And when he said as much that light in Barney’s eyes changed and his face lit up for the first time and Lee can remember nearly passing out because it took his breath away to see that. To see Barney living just as much as Lee was. To see both their wounds sealed and stitched and their broken pieces glued in place. 

And he finally had something else to dream about.

The team had been happy. And there was a lot of screaming and drinking and Galgo kissing both of them which was weird but at the end of the day it was him and Barney in bed, naked as the day they were born and Lee never thought anything made so much sense. 

It became their thing, never letting go, Barney’s hand on his, and they still trudge through mud and blood and bodies and did their jobs but at the end of the day, whether home or in a jungle, he was at Barney’s side and the guys were never too far away and that’s what Lee wanted. That was where he needed to be. 

Lee looks at Barney’s hand above them, wrapped around Lee’s, and he looks at Barney—so relaxed and happy, softest fucking look on his face—and he looks at their kid lying between them, thick clumsy fingers following the same paths across Barney’s tattoos that Lee had traced earlier and he smiles. 

He pulls himself closer to Barney and feels lips on his head, a kiss he passes down to the little one and he closes his eyes and tightens his grip on Barney’s hand and he hears Barney’s voice in the darkness. 

_Never letting go._


End file.
